Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Show HN: A Chrome extension that will auto-reject non-essential cookies
171–175 of 175 posts
Re: Show HN: A Chrome extension that will auto-reject non-essential cookies
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm currently at a small ad tech firm and while I can't speak for other outfits, we definitely are extra careful about respecting user consent indicators. Because we are small, it's not easy to do this, because there are many possible ways for users to "reject". This includes situations that merely imply non-consent due to inaction, rather than active non-consent like a reject cookie indicator, or living in a jurisdi…
Just curious, but it sounds like this is the ideal use case for Do Not Track. Do you all use that as a signal to not track/remove nonessential cookies?
Yes, we do treat that as a valid signal. But users still shouldn't use it today anyway, since it has no teeth and many companies will use it as part of a composite identifier. If Do Not Track had more regulatory teeth, I think it might have gone somewhere.
Global Privacy Control (GPC) is the modern alternative, and the mechanism by which California's privacy legislation / CCPA is largely handled from a technical perspective. Unfortunately it is not available by default in Chrome, but it is in eg Firefox / DuckDuckGo browser. Because it has legal teeth, it has more power to give you a tracking free experience even if a company had the technical capability to track you.
It can still help you even if you're not in California because geolocation is not perfect, but it does provide the ability to monetize ads that are tracking free. The threat of enforcement has to be real and continue to be demonstrated, though, or it won't last.
iCloud Private Relay also causes tracking companies a lot of real pain (sort of a mini-Tor where Apple and CloudFlare each have only half of your unlock key), but it's a technical bandaid with a variety of flaws that can break many legitimate things.
Ultimately each situation is one that requires judgement, which is why I think a legislative/judicial answer is the only one that ultimately holds up. GPC allows for a little more nuance than DNT. People care about the intent of respecting "Do Not Track." It some cases it may requirement a judgement about whether or not a company violated that request, not whether it was "technically impossible for the company to violate that request (we thought) but oh oops it was possible...I guess that just means we need to make it harder, the company doing the violating was okay because they worked within the bounds of what was technically possible."
A company that violates this privacy, especially when you've indicated that you do no consent, should have to face penalties. And because we expect some companies to go out of business for violating these rules, we should also make sure that their "data assets" aren't simply transferred to some new company in bankruptcy court when an adverse ruling comes down.
Re: Show HN: A Chrome extension that will auto-reject non-essential cookies
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the real problem was that it worked too good from the perspective of ad-tech and data-gatherers.¹ It relied on the goodwill of those who run these services to i) invest some effort and money to detect the DNT headers and then ii) not collect/store the data of these requests. Back, when only a tiny portion of web-users would send these headers along, the industry was fine to implement it. If only for marketing pur…
>adopted a "dark pattern" that annoys people It's not a dark pattern, but actually is similar to terms of conditions and privacy policies that sites show. Requiring users to go through legal agreements sucks, but companies can't just ignore the law in order to make a better user experience.
My website has no tracker nor any third party cookies so it doesn't need cookie dialog. And even if I had some analytics that stays on prem, doesn't store or gather PII, I wouldn't need one.
The first dark pattern, is that websites want to send all your PII and other data to other companies, and act as if this is normal.
The second dark pattern is how they do this. They could just not track and share this data, but allow you to flip some setting if you really want them to gather and sell or share this data. No popup needed. Or one that has some big button "proceed" that denies all tracking and a tiny link "advanced settings" that allows opt in to tracking. Instead, their UX is the exact opposite. Sometimes with deliberate javascript to make the "nope" button not work, slow or clumsy.
Re: Show HN: A Chrome extension that will auto-reject non-essential cookies
#174oh this feels like a must need for a person like me.
Re: Show HN: A Chrome extension that will auto-reject non-essential cookies
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the real problem was that it worked too good from the perspective of ad-tech and data-gatherers.¹ It relied on the goodwill of those who run these services to i) invest some effort and money to detect the DNT headers and then ii) not collect/store the data of these requests. Back, when only a tiny portion of web-users would send these headers along, the industry was fine to implement it. If only for marketing pur…
the GDPR refrained -rightfully so, IMO- from any implementation details I would disagree with this. If you're going to force bad actors to take actions that they don't want to, and you give them wide latitude to decide how to comply, then of course they're going to try to find ways to satisfy the letter of the law while avoiding the law's underlying goal. surveilance industry adopted a "dark pattern" that annoys peop…
I agree that much clearer constraints and less wiggle room would be better.
But imposing technical solutions in laws has hardly ever worked. Because these are almost always much easier to circumvent.
E.g. your suggestion to "honor browser headers" would be easy to circumvent by not having a browser - native apps, alt clients, etc. Google would easily track almost everything they do now through android, play services, email, docs, etc. And such implantation details inevitably get outdated. E.g. in The Netherlands we have a law that forbids, with severe punishment, that you read people's paper post. If only lawmakers hundreds of years ago had abstracted this to "correspondence" rather than paper mail in envelopes, it would've applied to email and probably all network traffic.